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One of the more important (and exclusive) tech industry events each year is the Wall Street Journal's All Things D conference. Hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, it draws many of the big names in the computer, telecom, CE, and entertainment industries to hear various folks talk about the world's transition from analog to digital.

This year's speakers included Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, CBS's Les Moonves, AOL founder Steve Case, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen of YouTube, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Senator John McCain, and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. In the audience to hear them speak were folks such as Martha Stewart, Hollywood director Barry Sonnenfeld, and Arianna Huffington, along with 300 or so movers and shakers who lead the industries mentioned above.

The conference kicked off with an evening Q&A with Sen. McCain. The obligatory questions about his position on the war in Iraq and his presidential bid were asked, but this audience was equally interested in his views on government intervention in the areas of telecom, Net neutrality, and spectrum allocation. He stated flatly that he is one of the biggest supporters of free trade and less government intervention, and does not support any heavy-handed regulation if it stifles innovation. He said he understands and sees both sides of the Net-neutrality issue and at the moment favors neutrality. And he was highly critical of the National Association of Broadcasters, which is dragging its feet about giving back spectrum. McCain said he wants the Federal Communications Commission to be more aggressive in making sure more spectrum is available, especially for use by first responders and the military.

The next morning, Steve Ballmer took the stage and showed off Microsoft's new "surface computing" technology. PCMag.com has covered this already, but I played around with it in San Francisco last week and found it very cool. Though it's not for consumers (the price is prohibitive, at $8,000 to $10,000), its use in hospitality, casino gaming, and food servicesareas in which Microsoft already has partnerscould make it a significant product. But the most important part of the new surface computing is "multitouch" technology. This lets a person use two hands simultaneously to interact with the computer; it even lets multiple users navigate at the same time, using their hands and fingers to move pictures around, activate applications, and so on. Apple and others have similar technologies on the way, but Microsoft's version is the first use of it in surface computing. Hand- or finger-based touch computing is gaining much more interest from both PC and CE vendors.

Ballmer was followed by Steve Jobs, who showed off the new YouTube connection to Apple TV. But the big news from his speech is in the way he is positioning Apple TV now. When it was introduced earlier this year, it seemed that Apple thought of it as a strategic product within its overall digital home line of products, but Jobs admitted that it is now unclear to him whether people really do want to move their content from the PC to the TV. In fact, he said that Apple has three core businesses and one hobby: The Mac PC, the iPod, and the iPhone are the businesses (all tied together with Apple software), and Apple TV is the hobby. I got the impression that the Apple TV has not sold as well as Apple had hoped, which has caused the company to rethink the device's future. Jobs then showed the new YouTube feature. We'll have to see whether or not it helps get people excited about the Apple TV platform.

Also taking the stage was Cisco CEO John Chambers, who explained that while Cisco might be thought of as the plumber of the Internet world the company is aggressively moving to expand into more areas of consumer products. He mentioned its purchase of Scientific Atlanta and WebEx, and he hinted that Cisco might even be interested in buying a social-networking company in the not-too-distant future.

The other speaker who really caught my attention was Les Moonves of CBS. I have spoken to a lot of studio execs in the last year, and from his remarks, Moonves appears to be the most Internet-savvy network CEO in the business. He pointed out that CBS really understands that it is a content company whose future is finding as many ways to distribute content through as many partners' sites as possible. He is also aggressively investing in new and original content. He said he is going to film schools and giving bright young filmmakers as much as $50,000 to create 12-minute series, as a part of a broad experiment to get more content for his broadcast network and for distribution over the Internet. He said he could even see one of these Internet-specific series someday finding its way onto the TV network. This is extremely forward-thinking from an "old world" broadcast network head.next: Gates and Jobs Share the Stage >

Tim Bajarin is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981 and has served as a consultant to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba and numerous others.
Mr. Bajarin is known as a concise, futuristic analyst, credited with predicting the desktop publishing revolution three years before it...
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